On August 9, Mark Linimon was talking about having users rank ports. The goal being to approximate a list of ‘key’ ports. I suggested allowing people to nominate their top N ports. And only N. They can change their selection at any time. It would be like a vote or poll, but you get to keep your list and change it over time. And why limit the question to top ports? Here are a few suggestion categories:

top useful ports

top good maintained ports

top ports I could not live without

top ports for a server|workstation|

top ports for a www|mail server

top N ports I wish were maintained

These are just suggestions…

There is no actual voting, in the traditional sense. Each FreshPorts user will have their own list. FreshPorts will aggregate those individual lists.

The data structure is pretty simple:

You have a question, which has up to N answers (so you can have one question that says: top 5 ports, and another that says top 10 ports). For each user, you can collect answers for each question (up to N), and each answer points to a port.

I think the user interface for this would be rather challenging. How do you let people select N ports? You could: